Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday night from 9-10 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Bob Gartner.

Listen live on the radioor on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;

An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

SIGNOFF QUOTE: “If you don’t want to hear it on the radio, DON’T DO IT!” ~ Maxine Mesinger (née Maxine Ethel David (December 19, 1925 – January 19, 2001), longtime celebrity gossip columnist for the Houston Chronicle, used this as her standard report sign-off. (Learn more about her here on Wikipedia

When Motorola was getting ready to spin off their TV division, they first renamed it Quasar. They took off the Motorola brand for a year or two. When they sold the division, there was no ambiguity: It was Quasar. Motorola was no longer associated with it by name.

QUICKEN HAS BEEN SOLD BY INTUIT to Private Equity Firm H.I.G.Middle Market (of H.I.G. Capital).

Last month, Intuit said goodbye to that heritage and sold Quicken, which still has loyal fans but weak growth prospects, to a private equity

Intuit, a Silicon Valley company, is now focusing on its TurboTax software, which tens of millions of Americans use to file their tax returns, and on QuickBooks Online, an Internet-based version of the company’s flagship bookkeeping software

Intuit is a classic case of a onetime disrupter being challenged by an upstart with a new approach and a simpler product. In this case, the newcomer is Xero, a New Zealand company that has wooed small businesses and accountants worldwide with a flexible, online accounting system that can be used from a smartphone and can cost as little as $9 a month.This renews one of the questions I asked last week:

ALL Apps $49.99/mo (The entire collection of 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps including Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC)

Key Question: Do you trust having all your financial data in the Cloud??

What do Brand Names mean anymore when we don’t know who really owns them, makes them, stands behind them, or maintains the original quality of the brand name we’re buying?

FROM JERRY: “Just 250 years ago, the human population of the world was less than one billion people, and two Asian countries -India and China-accounted for two -thirds of the world’s economic output, and they are not European.”

Quote from the Introduction of the book: The Origins of the Modern World, Third edition, 2015, by Robert W. Marks

according to the Census Bureau, by 2050 those ages 65 and up will make up an estimated 15.6% of the global population — more than double that of children ages 5 and under, who will make up an estimated 7.2%.

“This unique demographic phenomenon of the ‘crossing’ is unprecedented,” the report’s authors said.

There are and will continue to be differences between regions. Europe will remain the oldest region through 2050, with over 25% of Europeans older than 65 at that time, even though the pace of aging will slow.

while the percentage of China’s and India’s populations over age 65 may not be as large as that of various European countries or Japan, their overall populations are enormous, meaning that the total number of older people living in China and India will be much larger than the number living in other countries.

By comparison, some of the youngest countries will be located in South/Central Asia (Afghanistan), the Middle East (Kuwait, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia) and Southeast Asia (Laos).

… for China, turmoil in the steel and coal industries could have disastrous consequences for the social cohesion that has been needed to support and advance one of the world’s largest economies.

major Chinese steel producers lost more than 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) last year, an industry association said Thursday, and Beijing has said it will shed 500,000 steel jobs in coming years.

The figure is more than the 328,000 people directly employed by steel companies in the entire EU.

Reuters has reported that the government intends to lay off 5 million to 6 million state workers over the next two to three years, “as part of efforts to curb industrial overcapacity and pollution.”

Chinese leadership has promised that the 1.8 million workers who will be fired from government-run coal and steel firms (others will be laid off from private companies) will be retrained and rehired.

But that retraining may be for naught if the economies in China’s industrial regions — the country’s north and northeast in particular — don’t improve.

China’s economy grew 6.9% in 2015, the lowest rate in 25 years. Local economies in parts of Heilongjiang, in far northeast China, fell 10% in 2014. Coal prices in those areas have fallen by half since 2011, and the Chinese pullback from coal and heavy industry has left many workers without work and with few prospects.World export prices for steel have fallen more than 70% from an all-time high of $1,113 a metric ton in July 2008 to just $321 last month…

By 2014, China was producing some 820 million metric tons a year — about half the world total

Thousands of miners had taken to Shuangyashan’s streets in a “a direct challenge to Beijing’s assertion that it is proceeding smoothly with a sweeping plan to cut capacity in industrial sectors and make the economy more efficient,” according to the Associated Press.

Previous bouts of unemployment in China have been cushioned by a large agricultural sector to which migrant workers can return, but breakneck urbanisation has swallowed swathes of farmland over the last decade, and Shao said local workers “have no chance of going back to farming.”

This is the third round of rules the Obama administration has issued over the last two years to stop the flow so-called inversions, in which U.S. companies are bought by or merge with foreign firms to reduce U.S. corporate tax burdens.

The department’s latest batch of rules would make more difficult a practice known as “earnings stripping” that enables companies to lower their taxable U.S. profits. Using this strategy, the U.S. subsidiary of the inverted company can take on a loan from its foreign parent company. The interest payments on that debt can then be deducted from the U.S. company’s taxable income.

Currently, in order to escape some of the restrictions that the Treasury Department has put in place to stop inversions, the shareholders of the U.S. company must own less than 60 percent of the combined company. Pfizer’s shareholders own 56 percent of the combined company, for example. But that is in part because Allergen has completed previous inversions that have increased its size.

Under the new rules, it may become more difficult for Pfizer to include Allergen’s previous inversions when calculating whether the deal meets the 60 percent threshold.

US joins military exercises in Philippines to counter China’s buildup, [USA TODAY] 4-4-2016: TOKYO – More than 5,000 U.S., Philippines and Australian troops will take part in the annual Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) training exercises, which began Monday and run through April 16. Training includes amphibious warfare drills and disaster relief operations.

There will be five different home versions of Star Wars: The Force Awakenson launch day, with four of them being retailer exclusive versions that come with various extras. So what does each version come with, and which is the best deal?

Includes 72 current or former heads of state, “including dictators accused of looting their own countries” like Syrian president Bashar Assad and former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who the Guardianhas linked to some $2 billion in wealth

The “Panama Papers” leak, which includes roughly 11.5 million documents comprising nearly 40 years of day-to-day data, came from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth-largest offshore services company and a top creator of the shell companies used by wealthy to hide their assets. Their clients, whose offshore holdings in 21 tax havens have been revealed by the leak, include 12 current and former world leaders and another 128 politicians and public officials from more than 50 countries. The documents demonstrate how Mossack Fonseca has helped its clients launder money, avoid sanctions, and evade taxes — though it’s worth noting that the company denies any wrongdoing and has never been accused of, or charged with, any crimes. Also, as the Guardianpoints out, not everyone who uses offshore structures is a criminal, though many are, and having or using an offshore company is sometimes a perfectly ethical and logical way to conduct certain types of international business transactions.

The leaked “Panama Papers” cover a period over almost 40 years, from 1977 until as recently as last December, and allegedly show that some companies domiciled in tax havens were being used for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax avoidance.

“Currently we have identified over 800 individual taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong,” the Australian tax office said in a statement emailed to Reuters. It did not name the Hong Kong company.

A … program … announced last week by the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit that works with farmers and retailers to improve animal welfare, asks chicken farmers to change the breeds of the birds they are raising to a more hardy, slower-growing breed. …

So what the new GAP standard asks producers and retailers to do is to switch to broilers that have been bred to grow more slowly and in a more balanced manner: gaining no more than 50 grams of weight per day, which translates to a bird that lives 56-62 days instead of 35-42.

To investigate whether the change was feasible, GAP commissioned a working group of major chicken producers… , and involved Whole Foods, which evaluates all its meat purchases using the 5-step GAP scale. “All of our suppliers were interested…’” [said] Theo Weening, Whole Foods’ global meat buyer… “Some of them had long histories in the chicken industry, and they remembered when chickens were slower-growing and had more flavor. So when GAP came up with the standard, I went back to the suppliers, and they said, let’s work together, instead of having one guy make it to the finish line first.”

Nearly all New York State pet owners talk to their pets like they’re fellow humans, according to a recent poll. Many believe their dogs and cats can respond with barks or meows that communicate hunger, fear, or simply the need to pee. But do the animals tawk back in a Brooklyn accent? That’s the sort of thing Swedish cat lover and phonetics researcher Suzanne Schötz is working to find out. After executing this strategy on every government program except the military and corporate welfare, is it now the turn of the Supreme Court?

“’It’s not that the country has changed, it’s that a narrow band of mostly white, low- and middle-income Americans are supporting a candidate who is speaking to their anxiety about being left behind in this economy,’ said Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary.”

“Blue collar anxiety” is a real thing with real causes. That’s why so-called “Post-industrial Economies” are a fraud perpetrated against semi-skilled workers, and why industry needs to be re-invigorated in this country. We NEED blue collar jobs. Not everyone is cut out for ‘service’ work.

KPFT is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and it can always use your tax-deductible support. Most of the folks who work and broadcast at KPFTare volunteers, but it still has fixed and variable expenses, and it still costs $150/hour, 24/7/365 to keep KPFT on the air.

About Thinkwing Radio

Mike Honig is originally from Brooklyn, New York. He moved to Houston in September of 1977 and has been there ever since. Mike's interests are politics, history, science, science fiction (and reading generally), technology, and almost anything else. Mike has knowledge and experience in many diverse fields, sometimes from having worked in them, and sometimes from extensive reading or discussion about them. Mike's general knowledge makes him a favorite partner in Trivial Pursuit. He likes to say that about most things, he knows enough to be dangerous. Humility is a work-in-progress.